Blog about Blog about 2

Two weeks ago, on Easter Sunday/April Fools’ Day, I wrote a blog post I titled “Blog about Blog about” declaring a goal to blog — like, to write words about something — every day in the month of April 2018. The basic idea was to free myself from some of the anxiety that has built up into a genuine fear of writing over the past few years, which has led to me simply not to write as much as I used to.

It is now half way through the month of April and I have written fourteen (including this one) of my intended thirty posts. I failed to write on Friday the 13th.

Here are the things I’ve written about so far and my reflections on forcing myself to write about them in a fast and loose spirit:

April 2, on Iris Murdoch’s novel The Bell: I finished The Bell the day after I started the Blog about project. Had I not been doing the project, I probably would have sketched a few notes toward a review that I’d never end up actually finishing. It would hang out in the blog’s drafts folder forever. I’m strangely and probably unduly happy with what I ended up writing.

April 5, on Goya’s painting The Straw Man: I was very tired and did not want to write. I pulled down Robert Hughes’ biography Goya and thumbed through it, landing on a page I’d dogeared. Then I wrote the post. This method—grabbing a book somewhat at random—-also seems like a good way to write a post.

April 6, on the etymology of the word “blog”: I don’t even remember writing this one. I guess that’s why we write, to remember. I think that’s one of Socrates’ observations (or at least I think Plato wrote it down that Socrates observed this).

April 7, on Don DeLillo’s novel The Names: I often feel a bizarre and unnecessary guilt when I do not write about a novel I’ve read. I read The Names earlier this year and had intended to write about it and then didn’t. Or rather, I did write a bit about it, but I got bogged down in a kind of silly accounting of the novel’s approach to linguistics, which isn’t really what interested me about it that much anyway. The Blog about approach freed me to the extent that I didn’t even bother to quote from the novel, which is like, a bad approach to writing reviews—but a blog isn’t a review.

April 10, on the“ The Silvery Veil” tale that’s embedded in The Blithedale Romance: I also made some connections here to Madame Psychosis, a character in David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest. I’m sure someone’s already made those connections and written about them somewhere, but most of my Google searches led me back to, like, my own blog, which says more about my search strategies than anything else I guess.

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8 thoughts on “Blog about Blog about 2”

Ha! I remembered it was Friday the 13th when the handle on a gallon of paint broke, and the terra-cotta color exploded in all directions. Ten minutes earlier I’d pried the lid off that gallon of ‘mayacuya’ colored paint, which should have been a bright happy yellow. Yuck, it was not what we wanted, and I volunteered to walk back to the store and swap it for the yellow… well, next plan was to grab a paint brush and paint the bare concrete floor, since 1/3 of that paint was already on the floor! My 10-year old neighbor was walking down the stairs, trying to avoid stepping on me and/or the splotches of paint – and she tripped and sprawled down four or five steps before stopping at the bottom. She was ok – amazing! About thirty minutes later, as I brushed that paint on the floor and the risers of the cement steps, a 12-year old lad tripped on something on the sidewalk right outside the door, and he sprawled onto the cement as well. Bruised knee but otherwise ok.

All of this because you mentioned skipping Friday the 13th!

Because I am online so little, I especially appreciate your posts – the art and the literature, as I load pages and read them offline. Thanks for the work you put into the posts, even if you think no one reads them – some of us do!